described the queen’s interaction with Durga as more seductive than tortuous, as it had been with Kane himself. Thurpa had noted the obvious romantic relations between this very healthy, odd-hued woman and Durga. Right now, Brigid wasn’t entirely certain of who this Neekra was, but she knew full well that she and the queen were as related as the amorphous assassin and Kane’s psychic tormentor were.
Neekra was this woman’s self-appellation, and Brigid immediately returned to the dream wherein Kane had become aware of the artifact Nehushtan and the tales of a Puritan adventurer in the heart of Africa. Neekra matched up with not one but two names: Negari and Nakari—a hidden city and its queen, an immortal, vampirelike queen.
Nathan’s father had died of massive blood loss, and yet there had been very little blood spilled in the Longa home. The smell of blood was quite salty and coppery, Brigid knew from too much experience. Perhaps the reason no blood had been spilled was because it had been ingested, swallowed by the murderer.
Brigid’s mood turned black. A vampire queen and a hidden city.
Before skydark, Africa had been known as the Dark Continent. Now Brigid was certain they were going to find out exactly how dark. And that darkness could swallow them all whole.
Literally, Brigid feared.
Chapter 3
Kane’s mood was not good as he and Grant crept through the forest, closing in on the caravan that had crossed their path. Normally, he wouldn’t have been too interested in another group traveling through the jungle, and they had hidden their pickup truck, parked well off the formation’s route so as not to draw unwanted attention.
The group was armed to the teeth, and they had settled down for the evening not far from where Kane and his companions had set up their camp for the night. Traveling all day by truck was still tiring; there weren’t many roads, and the suspension could only take so much out of the bumps and jolts, especially for those who rode in the bed of the truck.
It was just good strategy for Kane and his allies to scope out a new group before coming out and greeting them, and seeing the column’s armed guards was more than a little unnerving. What made things even more tense was that they wore the uniforms of the Panthers of Mashona, the very militia they had battled back at Victoria Falls. While it was unlikely that Gamal could have communicated with this column, Kane was keen on keeping a low profile.
Well, he had been keen on that low profile.
Then he saw the row of naked Africans lying on the ground, connected to each other by chains and heavily burdened with steel yokes.
“We’re not going to leave well enough alone,” Grant murmured, counting on the Commtact to amplify the words in Kane’s ear.
“Slave traders. Damned straight we’re not leaving this alone,” Kane answered.
Grant nodded. Kane turned to regard his friend, and the massive former Magistrate’s brow wrinkled, knit with a mixture of concern and anger. His drooping gunfighter’s mustache only served to deepen the man’s frown into a grim mask.
Grant had no sense of solidarity with the blacks of Africa. Sure, his skin was dark like theirs, and they shared general facial features, but, culturally, Grant was a product of a world where race and familial history removed ties to anything other than fellow Magistrates. But here, Grant felt for the poor victims, lying immobilized by steel collars on their necks and shoulders, evidenced by the cracked, dried rivulets of blood on their torsos and the raw redness of scraped-off skin near the edges of those inhumane yokes. Kane heard the tendons in his fists pop as he flexed his big hands, and anger swiftly bled away as his eyes flitted from guard to guard.
Like Kane, he was sizing up the armed resistance, thinking of ways to kill the Panthers and to free their prisoners.
“We’re going to have to be very slow and patient,” Grant mused.
“Careful, yeah,” Kane agreed. “Even a silenced Copperhead would draw attention. It’s going to have to be knives and garrotes.”
Grant nodded. Neither Magistrate enjoyed murdering unaware opponents, but such ruthless tactics were going to be a necessity. If just one of the men standing guard over the prisoners suspected that someone was attempting a rescue, the Panthers would open fire, killing the group rather than giving up their treasured human cargo. “My bow, too.”
Kane turned, regarding the big man. “You brought that?”
“A collapsible version,” Grant replied.
Grant’s lover, Shizuka, the leader of the samurai force known as the Tigers of Heaven, had been teaching Grant to use the bow and the sword. It was a shadow of a skill that Grant had retained from when his tesseract—a physical “time shadow”—had been hurled back to the time of ancient Sumeria. Back then, Grant’s tesseract had been mostly amnesiac and just enough “off time” to have superior reflexes and durability, as well as his natural strength. His captor, a son of Enlil named Humbaba, had named Grant Enkidu, the man-bull, because of that physical power. In that era, Malesh, a rogue Annunaki, had been first Grant’s target, then his lover and co-warrior in a rebellion against Humbaba’s rule of the region.
Malesh was the inspiration for the mythic hero Gilgamesh, and she taught Enkidu the use of the bow as a replacement for Grant’s firearms knowledge. When Kane, Brigid, Domi and Shizuka had managed to arrive in the time stream where Grant’s tesseract had been deposited, the shadow had developed enough that its spirit gained reality in a spare body of the Annunaki court, returning Grant to his mortal form. All seven warriors had engaged the leonine, eleven-foot-tall Humbaba in direct conflict, finally killing the scion of Enlil after throwing everything at him, including flights of arrows, magazines of bullets and the slashing of deadly blades.
Grant had left his tesseract Enkidu back in antiquity, husband to a warrior goddess, and he’d returned home with the love of his life, Shizuka. Grant found great comfort with her.
“Bow’s pure silent, as opposed to a silenced gun,” Grant said. “And it packs a lot of power, especially with my strength and its construction.”
Kane didn’t doubt that. “Let’s get back to the others.”
The two Cerberus Magistrates slithered back through the forest. They moved slowly, cautiously, from where they’d closed on the slavers’ position. The two men took care to watch out for any sign that someone had come across their trail, and they felt secure once they didn’t pick up any. It helped that the two of them utilized the multiband optics in their shadow suits to look for spoor or tracks. Someone might have been good enough to evade high-tech optics capable of focusing on single broken stalks and twigs and disruptions in the dirt, or the talents of a skilled tracker, but when both combined, there was little sneaking up on them.
Then it would take an hour for the assembled travelers to make up a plan on how to assault the slave caravan.
The plan was simple: kill quietly or the failure would be measured in helpless prisoners executed.
Thurpa’s approach to the prisoners on the chain was at a midpoint on the line. There was only one member of the Cerberus group who could handle opponents at range with utter silence, and that was Grant. However, if there was one thing that the Nagah outcast knew he was capable of, it was a silent kill, by virtue of his half-cobra nature and the gifts that Enki had endowed every Nagah with—transformed or native born.
His
